A Magic Marker + A Newspaper = Blackout Poetry

Austin Kleon takes a kind of Rorschach approach to reading newspapers: he sees interesting words within the larger ink-on-paper dispatches about health care reform or the war on terrorism, and creates poems by using a magic marker to isolate them. Kleon’s so-called “Blackout Poems” have been featured on NPR, and are now in a new book, “Newspaper Blackout” (Harper Perennial). Speakeasy asked the Austin-based writer and cartoonist to work his magic with a few articles that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. You can check out the results in a slideshow.